HUNTING THE BIG UMBER BIRD

I have to tell you a very dull story. It relates no shootouts, no hangings, no burnings at the stake. This story would make a really bad comic book, er, sorry, graphic novel. Heck, it would make an uninspiring regular novel. And as a television series it is just a non-starter. So it must not be important, huh. And because it lacks all of those dramatic threds to string you, the reader, along, it will never make it on the news networks - which are in fact rarely new. But it really is an important story. And if I try and gin it up a little bit, you may agree. The facts, I assure you, are all accurate.

The central character is a guy named Charles Pollock. He lived in Boston in the 1890’s, a dull town in a dull time. And Charles worked in a bank; dull, dull, dull. But at least he was narcissistic. That made him a little interesting, if only to himself. Then, in 1894, dull dull Charles took a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court. It was that case which made Charles the hero of the modern anti-tax movement. And here let me suggest you imagine a really big explosion, a sucide bombing maybe, with piles of innocent people dead and dismembered laying all over the place, because, really, the anti-tax movement is just a looney tunes version of suicide bombing- you blow up yourself and everybody around you.

I don't like paying taxes. I never have, I never will. There are some things my taxes have helped pay for that I don't approve of; a couple of wars, subsidies to a few domestic monopolies and some foriegn dictators, to name just a few. But those pale in comparison to the sin of not having a state to protect me and you. And, call them libertarians or anarchists, those who oppose the power of the state to tax its citizens resemble, to borrow a description from Tom Wolf, “…the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.” (“From Bauhaus to Our House”) To whit:

The U.S. government has been taxing income since 1861, as permitted in the Constitution under Article 1, Section 2 ("Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several states…") and Article 1, Section 8 ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes,…"). But in 1862 Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the Dredd Scott decision which had helped to bring on the Civil War, became incensed that money was actually being taken out of his paycheck to help pay for the Civil War. Taney was a very strong believer in slavery and in being treated as somebody special.

And Taney’s objections to paying taxes for the Civil War also struck a cord with those who might not like slavery but who thought they were also special and did not deserve to be paying taxes. We're talking about rich people here, very rich people, who had no compunction about buying politicians to get what they wanted. Buying politicians is what is currently known as free speech, if your logic can somehow equate "buying" with "free" in the same thought without your head exploding.

Anyway, in 1872 the rich people had the income tax laws repealed. Unfortunatly for Taney he was already dead and he wasn't getting his money back. Or his slaves. For that he would have to wait until the "Inheritance Tax" could be redefined as the "Death Tax". But I digress...

For the next twenty years the Federal government struggled along supported by import duties alone, which amounted to less than 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product.  And yes, that is how we funded government before 1861. But before 1861 we were primarily an agricultural economy, where farm workers do not require much education, where populations were scattered and where all health problems were local, bcause transportation was by foot and horse. After 1861 we were a growing industrial economy. Factory workers required a high school education (or better). They were concentrated in population centers, and railroads were making  public health a regional problem. In other words, economic conditions had changed.

Now, besides being unable to support an effective government, import duties (taxes on imports), raised the price of all consumer goods, imported and domestic. In fact, during the 1880's import duties added as much as 48% to the final price consumers paid, for milk, for steel, and for everything in between. This protected domestic companies and allowed them to keep their prices high enough to ensure high profits. Are your eyes glazing over, yet? Picture this; you walk into your local 'speak easy ' and discover that overnight the price of a beer has gone up 50%. You ask the owner what gives. He tells you that he has new suppliers, and the cost of beer from them is 50% higher than it was from the old suppliers. You ask why he switched suppliers, and he explains, "They made me an offer I couldn't refuse."

Congressman William Jennings Bryant of Nebraska labeled high tariffs “socialism for the rich”. “They weep more because fifteen millions are to be collected from the rich than they do at the collection of three hundred millions upon the goods which the poor consume.” But it ain't like they did it in secret.

Between 1871 and 1891 sixty separate bills were introduced in congress to reestablish an income tax. That's right, people were actually fighting for the right to pay taxes. The Republicans, the party in power at the time, beat all of those efforts back. And then in 1893 a new tariff reform bill was introduced by Democratic Rep. William Wilson of West Virginia. Wilson's bill was primmarily intended to lower the import duties on foreign iron ore, coal, lumber, wool and sugar. But the bill also included a minor amendment, introduced by Rep. Benton McMillan from Tennessee, which read, “That from and after the 1st day of January, 1895, there shall be levied, collected, and paid annually upon the gains, profits, and income of every person residing in the United States, derived from any kind of property, rents, interest, dividends, or salaries…a tax of 2 per cent on the amount so derived over and above $4,000” during any five year period (equal to $88,400 today).

The pundits paid little attention to Mr. McMillan’s amendment because so many income tax measures had been introduced so many times before, and none of them ever came to anything. This was because the rich and powerful had a secret weapon, sort of a human tommy gun, a Homo sapian Chicago typewriter, if you will.

His name was Senator Arthur Gorman of Maryland, and he was a tool of the rich and powerful. Gorman helped the opponents of the Wilson bill attach more than 600 amendments which reinstated almost all of the import duties the bill had attempted to lower. It was a St. Vaentine's Day Massacre on the floor of United States Capital building, right in front of God and everybody, as my father used to say.

With the “Tariff reduction” bill thus bullet ridden and bleeding on the floor, no one believed that President Grover Cleveland, who had campaigned on a lower tariff platform, would ever sign the misbegotten bill into law. And he didn’t. He simply let the bill become law without his signature. It didn't cost him anything. At least the tariffs had been marginally lowered. At least he could claim that he had done everything he could to lower prices for working class Americans, while not having to actually do anything to openly offend his rich campaign donors.

But imagine the mobster's shock the next morning to discover that Al Capone had beat the rap for murdering the Bugs Moran's gang, but he was going to jail anyway for income tax evasion. That was the shock felt amongst the rich and powerful. America had returned to a national income tax. And the response was just what you would expect it would be from the rich and powerful. They sued.

The fine print of the accidental income tax law required that all stock companies pay the income tax for individuals before distributing any dividends to them. Dividends were income. And when he received his notice from the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company (because he owned all of ten shares of stock in Farmers’ Loan and Trust) Mr. Charles Pollock was very angry. He was angry enough to hire high priced Wall Street top gun lawyer named Joseph Choate, who filed a lawsuit against the bank claiming the income tax was unconstitutional.

The Massachusetts courts disagreed, as did the Federal courts. They both upheld the law. But somehow Charles Pollock found the money to appeal his lawsuit all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which, to everyone’s surprise, agreed to hear the case immediately.

On April 8, 1895 the court ruled 5-4, in favor of Mr. Pollock. That slim majority saying in essence that the source of income mattered; salary could be taxed, but income derived from property – rent, interest on savings or dividends paid on stock - were not “apportioned” by population, and thus the government was denied the power to tax it.

The dissenting opinions were intellecutally devstating. Justice Brown wrote that “This decision involves nothing less than the surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class…Even the specter of socialism is conjured up to frighten Congress from laying taxes upon the people in proportion to their ability to pay them.”

And Justice Harlan argued that the court's majority opinion, “…declares that our government has been so framed that,...those who have incomes derived from...bonds, stocks and investments...have privileges that cannot be accorded to those having incomes derived from the labor of their hands, or the exercise of their skill, or the use of their brains.” These were bother powerful arguements. But then the greedy have always been willing to lose the intellectual arguements, as long as they get to keep their money.

Middle class Americans were outraged. They were infuriated. They were fighting mad. And it would still take 11 years before the will of the people could overcome the power of the “moneyed classes”.

In 1909 President Howard Taft proposed a Constitutional Amendment (in part because he thought it would never pass) to allow a Federal Income Tax. On July 12, 1909 the 16th amendment passed the Congress and was submitted to the states, in part bcause the congress never thought the states would pass it. The amendment was brutally blunt and short. It reads in total, “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Period. End of Amendment.

Alabama took less than a month to vote for the 16th amendment. Kentucky, South Carolina, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Maryland, Georgia and Texas all passed it in 1910. Twenty-three more states followed in 1911, three more in 1912, and six more in 1913.

It was with the vote of the New Mexico legislature, on February 3, 1913, that made the 16th amendment the law of the land. Six states either rejected the amendment or never took it up, but that did not matter. The Constitution only requires that two-thirds of the states approve of an amendment to make it the law.

And so, when some lunatic or confidence man or woman tries to seduce you with a magical scheme to avoid paying taxes, you can now explain to them that, by placing the source of support for the government in the people’s hands, income taxes places the power there as well.

The relevancy of this tale of narcissism to your life may become clearer when you realize that on June 1, 1929 the Farmers Loan and Trust Company named in the lawsuit changed their name to City Bank Famers Trust. And then in 1976 they changed their name again. This time they shortened it to Citibank.

This is the same Citibank that in 2009 swallowed some $320 billion of taxpayer (meaning your) bailout dollars. Oh, as of 1894, Charles Pollock was an employee of Farmers Loan and Trust in their Boston branch. And it seems likely to me that he sued his own employer with their connivance. Looking at history it seems to me that the limits to which the rich will go to avoid paying their fair share of government remains endless. These people just think they are top of the world, ma!

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AMAZING RACE; PART I

I think the "Amazing Race" was  a good idea. There were three serious contestants, and a $50,000 first place award. What was amazing was that nobody collected a dime in prize money. It was 1911. Flying was still brand new and the world’s first two pilots were still flying: Wilbur and Orville Wright. The third pilot was Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, and he had died on September 17, 1908, in a crash that also badly injured Orville. The second pilot to die was Charles Rolls (of Rolls-Royce fame), in a 1910 crash. Considering there were only about 100 men (and one woman) with flying licenses in America in 1911, two percent was an appalling death  rate, bad enough to make you wonder why anybody would have wanted to try flying.

The world’s 49th licensed pilot was a shy, cocky, 6’4” thirty-something, cigar smoking, playboy and adrenaline freak with a hearing loss named Calbraith Perry Rogers. He was a romantic who favored action over words, as proven by the way he met his wife, 20 something Mabel Groves (left). He saw her drowning, jumped in, pulled her to safety and later married her, despite the hat. He approached flying with the same spontaneity. Having seen his first airplane on a visit to Dayton, Ohio, in June of 1911, Cal took the full Wright Brother’s flight course, all 90 minutes of it. Then he talked his mother, Maria, into loaning him $5,000 so he could buy a Wright Model B Flyer “E-X”; the "E-X" was for experimental – which was a joke because every “aeroplane” was experimental in 1911. But Cal may also have been the origin of the phrase to “take a flyer”, because just two months later, in August, he entered his Wright Flyer in an air show in Chicago and took home third prize, worth $11,285. Not bad: Cal had been a pilot for 60 days and already he had made six grand profit. He suspected there might be money in this flying thing. In October of 1910 the Hearst newspaper chain had offered $50,000 to the first pilot to make it across the continent in 30 days or less. The offer was set to expire on October 10th , so with his self supplied confidence, Cal decided to go for it. 

 What Cal needed, as any NASCAR driver can tell you, was a sponsor. He found his ‘sticker sucker’ in a new soft drink, “VIN FIZ”. Allegedly it was grape favored soda water but one critic noted that it tasted like “…a fine blend of river sludge and horse slop” With a product like that the Amour Meat Company, proud owners of Vin Fiz, were going to need a heck of an advertising campaign. Enter Cal and his flying bill board.

With a guarantee of $23,000 from Amour, which also provided a three car support train (complete with a repair car and a reservoir of spare parts, a motor car to track down Cal whereever he had crash landed, and sleeping car accommodations for Mable, Cal’s mother Maria, his cousin, his head mechanic Charlie Taylor, two other mechanics, two assistants and assorted reporters from the Hearst news service), Cal figured he had it all figured out. The first problem was that, before Cal even got airborne, his "Vin Fiz" was already in third place.

First off, from Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco, was motorcycle racer Bob Fowler. There were 10,000 cheering people there at 1:35 P.M., on September 11th to see Bob off.  Like Cal, Bob was piloting a Wright “B” Flyer, except his sponsor was the Cole Motor Company, of Indianapolis, Indiana, and they had supplied him with one of their engines and a little cash. The Cole engine  more powerful than the Wright engine, but it was also 200 lbs heavier. Plus they were only paying Bob $7,500.00 for the whole trip. Making an average speed of about 55 miles an hour, Bob reached Sacramento in just under 2 hours, and after spending a couple of hours schmoozing with California Governor Hiram Johnson, Bob flew on to Auburn; for a total distance on the first day of 126 miles. On September 12th he reached Alta, California, where he crashed into some trees. Bob was now out of the race until repair parts could be rushed out from Frisco.

Second to start was James J. (Jimmy) Ward,  pilot's license #52, and previously a jockey. He was flying a Curtis Model D. James took off from Governor’s Island in New York harbor on September 13th. He immediately got lost over New Jersey, and made only twenty miles before crash landing. Then he too had to wait for repairs. The basic tone of the entire race for everybody had thus been set right away; take off, crash, wait for repairs, take off, crash, wait for repairs, and repeat as necessary. It was going to be very hard to finish this race, let alone win it.

Before starting himself, Cal Rogers tied a bottle Vin Fiz to one of his wing struts (white circle on the left), “for luck”. For reality, he tied a pair of crutches to another strut. Before a paying crowd of 2,000, a chorus girl poured a bottle of grape soda over the landing skids and proclaimed, “I dub thee “Vin Fiz Flyer””. Cal actually called his plane “Betsy” but he recognized the value of naming fees even back then.

Cal took off from the race course at Sheepshead Bay, Long Island at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 17th. And if anybody noticed it was the third anniversary of the crash that had killed Lieutenant Selfridge, they were polite enough not to mention it.

After take off Cal buzzed Coney Island and dropped coupons for free Vin Fiz soda. Then he flew across Manhattan “…with its death-trap of tall buildings, ragged roofs and narrow streets”, as the breathless reporters reported breathlessly. Cal landed in Middleton, New York that night to a cheering crowd (reported as 10,000 – not to be bettered by San Francisco). He had made all of 84 miles that first day.

That night the reporters claimed that Cal claimed he would be in Chicago in four days. But Cal was shy, because of his bad hearing, the byproduct of a scarlet fever attack in his childhood. So he didn't like talking to reporters because he often barely heard their questions. So the reporters just made up heroic quotes for Cal. They invented more heroic quotes for him the next morning when, on take off,  the "Vin Fiz" hit a tree and ended up in a chicken coop. The bottle of Vin Fiz was miraculaously undamaged but now it was Cal’s turn to wait for repairs.

The race was on!

NEXT WEDNESDAY: HEADWINDS

IDES OF MARCH - 2010

I have celebrated The Ides of March as the political holiday for more than two decades now. It is a day to commemorate our entertainment and edification by political hacks from Pericles to Eric Massa. In doing so we annually mark the day 2,054 years ago now, when the Roman Senator Gaius Cassius Longinus brilliantly settled a political standoff by imposing term limits upon Julius Caesar. As the original winner of the first “Laurel and Dagger” award, Caesar exemplified the combination of professional arrogance and moral ineptitude required to win the “Knife-in-the-Back Plaque”

Having already won immense wealth from power, Caesar hungered for more of both. Warned of the consequences of this policy by pundits, allies and enemies alike, Caesar remained adamant that he was not only smarter than all of them, but that his boldness compensated for his failings. He was not and it did not. What had been bold in a thirty year old enigma was clumsy in a fifty year old familiar opponent. And as behooves a “Senatorial Shiv to the Solar Plexus” at the moment of his demise Caesar was surrounded by his political allies - who were all wielding knives. For if politics is based upon loyalty, then it is also true that no politician ever gets ahead without sacrificing a few friends now and again, and the only difference between a good politician and a great politician is the quality of the friends they leave “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind”, to quote Nixon hit man Charles Colson.

Each year’s winner is the politician who over the previous twelve months best exemplifies arrogance and blindness to danger, such as last years surprise winner, Governor Milorad “Rod” Blagojevich, who continued to conspire to commit illegal acts on telephones he publicly alleged were “tapped” by the FBI. They were. Or consider the example of the pervious winner, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer, who was elected on a promise to “change the ethics of Albany”, while remaining in good standing as Client Nine, who spent $15,000 on employees of the Emperors Club prostitution ring.

This year’s nominees included the Republican Congressional Caucus, which is doggedly pursuing a policy of diminishing options, leading to an increasingly certain political dead-end. There was also Michele Bachmann and Elizabeth Cheney, each of whom displayed a consistent inconsistency which seemes destined to drown her in her own cacophony of contradiction.

Also in the running was Democrat John Edwards, carrying the mantle of Gary Hart, who  invited the media spotlight while committing personal transgressions best commited in the shadows. But this year's winner has managed, in an increasingly bizarre political universe, scored on two of the three options at the same time.

But who will be awarded the Grand Prize this year? There were several possibilities, and a recent poll conducted on The Daily Kos offered the award committee (me) several viable nominees. But this year’s victor, although a late entry, was a stand out doody-head, a politically deaf and dumb arrogant jerk who has angered friends and embarrassed allies in the true spirit of Julius Caesar. He missed only by displaying no sexual picadilos, for which I am grateful. Still, this year’s champion chump is a man who by his grandstanding strike against those he believes betrayed him. has also irreparably damaged his own reputation while simultaneously raising the real possibility that he may spend his final years in debt and in jail. This year’s winner of the Ides of March L and D Award is that pompous and prideful two term senator from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Jim Bunning.

Who is this man? He was a professional baseball player for 17 years. Not surprisingly he batted right and threw right. And Jim Bunning is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But he failed to make it into the hall during his 20 years of regular eligibility, and was saved from obscurity in the last possible year by the Veterans Committee.

There may be a couple of explanations for this slight toward a man who pitched two no hitters (one in each league) and a perfect game. First, there is the curious fact, pointed out by Kieth Olbermann on his MLB Blog, that “….not once in four pennant sprints did he finish strongly.” And then there is one other odd statistic. Over his career Bunning faced 15,618 batters. And he hit 160 of them, earning him the title of “Beanball Bunning”.

That number, 160, ranks Bunning 13th on the all time list of pitchers who hit the most batters. Nolan Ryan, also known as a control and intimidation pitcher, faced 22,575 batters (44% more than Bunning) and hit only 158, two less. Jim Bunning did not throw at batters to intimidate. He threw at batters to punish. If your team was getting hits off of Bunning, he would make you pay for it. And it was his “reputation for throwing inside”, and as “one of the few men ever to get Mickey Mantle mad enough to charge from the batters' box” that kept Bunning out of the Hall of Fame until 1996.

Bunning retired as a player following the 1971 season. Philadelphia hired him to manage a Double A minor league team, but he never rose any higher in the organization, and was fired in 1976. Bunning then paid the owners back for this insult by becoming an agent, and negotiating expensive contracts for a half dozen of Philadelphia’s minor league players. Firing Bunning cost the Phillies a couple of million dollars.

In 1977 a funeral director named Fred Earschell paid a visit to Bunning’s home in the upper class enclave of Fort Thomas, a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati, and urged him to run for the city council. Despite Bunning’s claim that he “never had a desire to be in politics”, he easily won election from a field of 13. And that victory seems to have changed his mind about politics. Bunning served just two years on the city council. He then won election to the Kentucky Senate, and was made minority leader. He lost an election for governor in 1983, but in ’86 he won election to the U.S. 4th District House seat, in what was called the most Republican district in Kentucky. President Bill Clinton said of Bunning, “I tried to work with him a couple times, and he just sent shivers up my spine....this guy is beyond the pale” In 1999, Bunning won election to the United States Senate. He was now 67 years old.

And upon reaching the Senate, something changed in Bunning. Unfortunately, it was not his personality. It was his work ethic. To quote a liberal blogger, as a senior member of the ruling party, “In 2001, Senator Bunning voted for the first round of Bush tax cuts that weren`t paid for. Two years later, he voted for a second round of Bush tax cuts that weren`t paid for. That same year, he voted for the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit that, you guessed it, wasn`t paid for.” At the same time his popularity in Kentucky was beginning to fade.

Bunning entered the 2004 election with a $4 million campaign war chest. His Democratic opponent had only $600,000. Then it became public that Bunning was touring the state with an extra large tax payer funded security detail. When questioned, Bunning warned, “There may be strangers among us.” Bunning claimed that his wife had been physically attacked by Democratic Party workers, but no proof was ever offered. When these flashes of paranoia caused his poll numbers to slip, his response caused them to slip even more. He told a local reporter, “I don’t watch the national news, and I don’t read the paper. I haven’t done that for the last six weeks. I watch Fox News to get my information.” Bunning finally agreed to a debate with his opponent, but insisted that it not be televised live. Even then, at the last second, he flew to Washington and made his debate appearance via satellite from the RNC offices, reading his responses off a teleprompter. Things got so bad that in the last weeks of the election Bunning was forced to spend $800,000 of his own money to buy television ads. Bunning won by just one percentage point.

In 2006 Time Magazine tagged Bunning as one of America’s Five Worst Senators, noting his “lackluster performance” and that he showed “little interest in policy unless it involves baseball”. It also mentioned his hostility towards his own staff and his fellow Senators, and his “bizarre behavior.” A September 2009 statewide opinion poll gave Bunning an approval rating of 35%, with a disapproval rating of 55%. That same year, the Congressional Quarterly ranked Senators, giving the most powerful a rating of 1. Bunning was ranked at 78.

Bunning was AWOL for most of January 2009, and when reached by phone he refused to tell the reporter where he had been or was. As of April 2009, Bunning had $263,000 in his war chest, three-quarters of which came from outside of Kentucky. His approval rating in the state was down to 28%. Kentucky Secretary of State Republican Trey Grayson smelled blood in water and announced he was forming an exploratory committee to run for Bunning’s job. In a speech on May 8, Bunning announced, “The battle is going to be long, but I am prepared to fight for my values.” And ten days later he announced, “If Mitch McConnell (Republican Senate Minority Leader, also from Kentucky) doesn’t endorse me, it could be the best thing that ever happened to me in Kentucky.” Then he threatened sue his own party if they ran somebody against him. When the chairman of the RNC publicly assured Bunning they would not be supporting any Republicans other than him, the Senator made more friends by telling the Louisville Courier-Journal, “I don’t believe anything John Cornyn (RNC Chair) says."

Finally, in July of 2009, Bunning was forced to bow to the inevitable. He announced that he was giving up his hopes for re-election because he could not raise enough money to be competitive. The only question left was how he intended upon making the Republican Party pay for not supporting him. And in February of 2010 we found out. By staging a one man filibuster Jim Bunning decided to cut off unemployment benefits for 300,000 Americans, and cut off payment to Federal Inspectors, without whom a dozen highway projects could not continue, killing even more jobs. The Democrats were outraged. The Republicans were appalled. Buunning justified his actions the guise of protesting deficit spending, something he had showed no interest in from his first appearance in the Senate in 1998, to just days before his filibuster when he did not even bother to show up for a vote on a “Pay-as’you-go” measure.

To “Beanball Bunning”, a few hit batters is the price you have to pay to get your revenge. And he considered that hitting the 60,000 unemployed Kentuckians left without cash to pay their grocery bills as the batters on the opposing team who had to take the hit to punish the Republican Leadership for not supporting him. And with any luck and if the Democratic Party ever decides to fight for something, they will accept Bunning’s gift and bean the “Party of No” right in the head with Bunning's pitch. Which was "Beanball's" intent.

The problem for Bunning himself is that his notoriety has drawn attention to his own Achilles Heel, the tax-exempt Jim Bunning Foundation, which has a bank balance of $146, 342. Three people sit on the board that runs the foundation, Bunning, his wife, and a Cincinnati baseball memorabilia collector. The foundation has only one employee, Jim Bunning. He works for the foundation for one hour a week, signing memorabilia, for which he is paid $13,000 a year, 36% of the foundations annual outlay.

According to the Louisville Courier, the Bunning Foundation “…divided $18,200 among 25 recipients. Bunning's current church…received $5,250, by far the largest single donation…"  Melanie Slone, Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, described the ratio of Bunning's salary to gifts by the Bunning Foundation as “…very troubling.” And Daniel Birochoff, President of the American Institute if Philanthropy said, “"For (Bunning) to be taking more for himself than he gives to the charities just doesn't look good, no matter how you cut it. The IRS doesn't want people to just set up their weekend hobbies as nonprofit foundations so they can take advantage of the tax-protection rules.” And yet that is exactly what Bunning has done, secure that as a Senator he will be not be treated like an average tax payer.

As "Beanball" Bunning moves into retirement, he will receive $83,000 in tax payer funded retirement each year, plus full benefits, including the generous health care plan that his party is determined the average American shall be denied access to. So for the inequity and the outrageous arrogance of his actions, for the selfish foolhardiness and mean spirited greed he has always displayed, the obvious choice for the 2010 winner of the Laurel and Dagger Ides of March Award is Senator Jim Bunning, selfish greedy political hack desguised as a conservative. Congratulations, Senator!

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